This interview is part of a Boardroom Insight article series exploring the marketing consulting landscape from the perspective of industry executives. Nima Chadha is the vice president of marketing at Aventi Group, a San Francisco-based marketing agency with clients that include SAP, Adobe, ServiceNow and other leading tech companies.

Boardroom Insight: After a B2B software startup raises venture funding, it can get from small founding team and no marketing department to 10+ marketers very quickly – often within a few years. How does that build-out process tend to unfold and what role can an external marketing agency play in helping a startup get its go-to-market operations up and running?

Nima Chadha: The build-out is really a change management initiative to say the least. It’s usually marketers that started as the “jack of all trades” doing everything well and getting a small company to scale, who are then placed in situations where they need to expand their strategy and channel reach and turn things that were “good” to “great”. So, the need for specialization in specific areas of marketing arises. This is where the big question of who can I hire in-house vs. what can I outsource comes into play.

An agency partner that has seasoned professionals and experience within the industries you serve is a great option. Sometimes, they enter a stop-gap solution and other times, they’re truly a partner and an extension to your existing team. That’s something we pride ourselves heavily on at Aventi. We come in as partners vs. off-shore outsourced consultants that may not understand the core of the business. The goal is to engage them early and have a plan for working alongside them to ensure it’s a successful relationship.

Boardroom Insight: The marketing software landscape has many sub-segments – there are tools that assist with advertising, tools that focus on email newsletters and so on. In each of those sub-segments, there are usually multiple products that offer similar features. What factors should a startup look at when it’s considering which martech product to use for a given task?

Nima Chadha: It’s important to consider what stage of growth your business is currently in when evaluating your tech stack. The market is crowded with tools that will “simplify” the way we work; however, it can also come with a heavy price tag and a heavy reliance on project management.

It’s important to identify and evaluate what’s a requirement vs. a nice-to-have when it comes to your marketing initiatives for the year. A strong go-to-market plan will identify the outcomes you’re working on achieving and also the tactics and channels it’ll take to get there. Mapping this out as a preliminary step is imperative before investing in various martech that is crowding the market. However, at a bare minimum, I’d also recommend some type of marketing automation platform (Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua etc.) to kick off some inexpensive email marketing, landing page management and lead capturing.

Boardroom Insight: Search and social media ads are a core pillar of B2C marketing campaigns. What role do those channels have in the B2B software industry?

Nima Chadha: Organic growth plays a huge role in both B2B and B2C industries. If we think about the world we play in today, the absence of an organic and social strategy are detrimental to success no matter what type of business you’re in. The B2B software space is full of competition and there are usually multiple options our buyers are going through.

When it comes to organic search, the pillars of an SEO strategy are integral for B2B companies to follow to remain ahead of the curve. This includes how a business may find your website, evaluation of your thought leadership content and how friendly your site is in totality. The average attention span for any given person is so short that we need to make sure we’re conveying the right message when they land on a website.

Social media for B2B businesses can be huge from a lead generation perspective. Although we’re targeting businesses, there are people behind those businesses that need to have a favorable image of who we are, what we do, and how it can help. I should add that social presence and social engagement should always be looked at separately and managed separately as well. It’s one thing to have a profile on a specific platform, it’s another to have engagement on that profile. Engaging with end users that are prospects or customers provides businesses with intel they wouldn’t get elsewhere.

Boardroom Insight: B2B software deals often involve multiple stakeholders. An HR software deal might involve the client company’s chief people officer, members of the HR team and someone from the CIO’s office. For software companies that face multi-stakeholder sales situations, how can marketing help deliver a compelling message that resonates with all the relevant decision-makers?

Nima Chadha: This goes back to developing personas that enter your buying cycle. It’s really important for marketing to work closely with sales and identify decision makers and influencers throughout the marketing and sales processes. A strong messaging playbook that’s been built alongside the sales team is an integral tool to ensure you’re having the right conversation with the right person at the right stage of the buying process.

It’s also important to identify who needs to be a part of a conversation and at what stage. For example, something that is relevant to the head of operations might be a message tied to efficiency vs. a message that is relevant to the head of revenue will be something tied to bottom line growth. Storytelling and narrative building exercises and workshops can help set marketers up for success in these areas.

Boardroom Insight: How has the marketing tooling landscape evolved over the past few years and where do you expect the market to go from here?

Nima Chadha: There’s been a complete shift in the tools marketers used ten years ago vs. the tools marketers use today. We live and work in an environment where change is constant and we’re always trying to keep up.

Recently the introduction of AI has been a huge shift that marketers cannot ignore. It’s providing us with the ability to work more efficiently and empower our teams with virtual support they didn’t have before. As I think forward to the next 5-10 years, I think there will be an even larger emphasis on AI and machine learning that will enable us to further personalize and automate tasks we do manually today.

I also believe there will be a larger emphasis on social media based on the way the newer generation are absorbing content and where they’re spending most of their time as buyers. Ten years ago we wouldn’t have imagined platforms like Instagram and TikTok would exist for both B2B and B2C markets, so I think the sky’s the limit for what’s to come.

text

text